Montblanc launches its first smartwatch, the Montblanc Summit

Montblanc has joined Tag Heuer with the launch of its own Android Wear watch, the Montblanc Summit, its first foray into digital timekeeping.

With the move, the luxury brand now brings its own expertise for crafting mechanical timepieces, to digital timekeeping.

The Montblanc Summit comes with a brown sfumato style leather strap and all-black stainless steel case, which makes for a classy look, though at a 46mm diameter and a height of 12.5mm, it is a large watch.

The Summit is a luxury watch, with a starting price of $890, and$930 for the sfumato leather strap version.

The finish on the Summit's surface catches light attractively and shows it off better in the naturally coloured stainless steel case than the black version. But the company also offered, a third two-tone option, titanium, that blended the two colours, and was priced $980 with the basic strap or $1,020 with an upgraded one.

Strap choices on offer range from the cheapest - black calf leather, to natural rubber at $930 price point - to brown alligator skin that, coupled with a titanium case was priced at $1,070.

The Android Wear 2.0 software on board is standard Google fare, but comes with preloaded Foursquare, Uber, and Runtastic apps.

According to Montblanc, the release of Android Wear 2.0 presented the perfect opportunity for it to launch a smartwatch, since the latest version of Google's wearable platform played much better with iOS (thus increasing the Summit's potential customer base).

According to commentators, the Summit was an attempt to put Swiss style and the same design language as Montblanc's 1858 analog timepiece collection into a smartwatch. In keeping with this, the Summit comes with a selection of exclusive watch faces - primarily digital versions of classic Montblanc designs, as also the odd new one with stopwatch functionality and such stuff.